


Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Fugitive (1993)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-12
Updated: 2008-12-12
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:42:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Gerard had always been a fan of the outlaws in country-western music: Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash.  a Gerard POV coda to the movie that involves country music, Chicago, and a beer with a former fugitive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to anxietygrrl, kirbyfest, and upsy_daisy, my beta trio posse people.
> 
> Written for Chichiri no da

 

 

Sam Gerard had always been a fan of the outlaws in country-western music: Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash.

When Biggs asked him why he played music about convicts and murderers-- and, in one instance, sung by a man who had done time in San Quentin--during downtime and paperwork, he said, "Don't you have something to do besides annoy me, Biggs?"

The truth of the matter was simple: all those men sung about lives lived single-mindedly... even if they were lives of murder and theft. And what Sam Gerard believed in above all was a life lived with single-minded purpose.

Perhaps that was why Richard Kimble had switched his track so thoroughly. 

***

He saw Kimble at the CPD station house on South State after escorting him from the Palmer House. They passed each other as Kimble was led to the district commander's office. The reporters were everywhere--in all his years with the Marshals, he couldn't remember seeing national news anywhere in his jurisdiction. 

As Kimble passed, Gerard nodded, and Kimble nodded back.

Camera flash increased, and the commotion from the reporters reached an unbearable level. Gerard heard one reporter shouting, "Dr. Kimble, how are you going to thank the US Marshal that believed in you this whole time?"

Gerard allowed himself a chuckle as he headed back out to see Cosmo at Rush. He imagined that Kimble would start by not bringing up the story about the US Marshal who had pointed a gun at him in a drainage pipe. Or who had shot to kill at the county jail.

Or maybe Kimble would tell that story. It was the truth, and Kimble seemed to be dedicated to the truth.

And Gerard wouldn't hesitate to confirm it. It was his job, after all, to capture men considered armed and dangerous.

***

The hospital room TV was set to the local news. Remote in hand, jaw still swollen, Cosmo said, "Sammy, you should think about getting an agent."

What Gerard wanted to do was take a long vacation. But leaving work now could mean never coming back. He sat back in the chair across from Cosmo's bed. "Too bad that I-beam didn't shatter your jawbone."

Cosmo smiled (so Gerard guessed by the crinkling of the bandages), then sighed. "What are you going to do? It's going to be a bitch to get any work done."

Cosmo was right, and not just because of the media -- as solitary as Gerard felt in his job, he relied on his team, needed them to function effectively. And Cosmo would be out for at least three weeks from the looks of it, if not more.

"Work has to get done." Then, with the tip of his shoe, he gave the hospital bed a tap, as a way of acknowledging what had gone unsaid.

"I would've liked to be a celebrity." Cosmo punctuated this thought by waving the remote at the TV, where Gerard and Kimble exchanged their muted nods, as a reporter explained a bit of the Kimble timeline. "How long before Kimble sues the City of Chicago, do you think?"

"Don't know. Sounds like he fired his lawyer. That gal we interviewed at CCH, Dr. Wahlund? She's lined him up with a new one." There was a pause as the two of them watched footage of Sykes, then Nichols, getting hauled out of squads flash by. "Probably won't be long."

"Sammy, do you ever wish Kimble's dive off that dam had turned out differently?"

Gerard looked at Cosmo quickly, almost blurting an angry "Don't be stupid." But he held off. He thought for a moment or two.

"No. No, I don't." 

He wanted to make sure he meant it before he said it.

***

After a few days passed, Gerard wished he could reassess his thoughtful answer to Cosmo.

The calls from reporters of all kinds poured in, though they all seemed the same kind of shiny schmoozing voices. It was infuriating, because the general order to the public relations department was "no comment." But somehow, someone had leaked his home and cell phone number. It had reached the point where he wasn't answering anything but his office phone, checking his voice mail every hour or so for anything important.

The bosses wanted him to do one or two select interviews for print (knowing as they did that he was not cut out for on-camera chit-chat). Put a positive face on the organization.

Bullshit. Total bullshit. Cosmo's enthusiasm for celebrity aside, that wasn't what the job was about. It was about pursuit and capture--two procedures best done in relative anonymity.

Several reporters suggested a joint interview. Him and Kimble. Side by side.

Gerard couldn't even wrap his head around that. He supposed he knew why people wanted to see it, but he wouldn't even know where to begin.

Listening to Kimble's story from the beginning was hard enough.

***

Gerard hadn't frequented bars in many years, choosing instead to drink a beer at home rather than go out somewhere he felt obligated to scan the crowd for his work to-do list. But the pub he stopped at on the first day of August was of particular interest to him. In fact, he had made a special trip to Pullman in hopes that what he'd heard through the law enforcement grapevine - he still had a few contacts at the CPD, though few and far between, even after Sykes had been formally charged with the shooting of the young beat cop on the train - was true.

The bar was quiet, with a scattered, diverse clientele, and had the ominous lightlessness and anonymity-friendly atmosphere of a long-standing tavern. Gerard knew he'd found several collars in places similar to this, where the booths hugged the wall and embraced its residents in shadows.

Taking a last look around, Gerard knew this for certain: even though innocent, Kimble would always have a bit of con in him.

As though wishing to continue his impressive streak of remaining contrary to Gerard's views on life, Kimble was standing in a dusty beam of light at the end of the bar, leaning in a manner that seemed relaxed until you studied his face. Even in profile, with a longneck obscuring part of his face, Gerard knew Kimble and knew the wary, worn anxiousness he projected.

Gerard gestured at the bartender and asked for a draft Old Style, then took his beer over to Kimble's side of the bar.

Kimble appeared to be watching a Sox game. The stereo behind the bar was playing Marty Robbins, so quietly that Gerard almost missed it. `He came here to take an outlaw back alive or maybe dead.'

If that wasn't some timing.

"Richard."

Kimble looked out of the corner of his eye, startled, but in the way that Gerard managed Kimble would startle the rest of his life: with a modicum of expectation, as if being followed were simply par for the course.

"What are you doing here?" The tone of Kimble's voice wasn't as rude or angry as his words implied... though he certainly wasn't overjoyed.

"Heard you were here once in a while." Gerard looked over at the pay phone where Kimble'd done his initial legwork to track down Sykes. "Looking to start a detective agency or something?"

Kimble shrugged. "Got used to it down here. It's close enough to the hospital."

They each drank from their beers, watched as Frank Thomas took a big but futile cut at a fastball.

"Cosmo appreciated the specialist you sent his way. Says there'll hardly be a scar." Gerard kept his joking exchange with Cosmo about the vast improvement a scar would make on Renfro's face to himself.

"That was Kathy." After a moment or two of silence, Kimble sighed and set down his beer. "You have something on your mind?"

"Usually." Though he'd been thinking about this visit for a while, Gerard was having some difficulty addressing what it was *exactly* that was on his mind. "I imagine you've had some trouble getting back into living life. Working."

Kimble considered him a moment, very deliberately using his surgeon's fingers to remove the label from his bottle one thread-like strip at a time. "Getting back to work was the easy part."

It was Gerard's turn to sigh. "I'd like to say the same. Reporters calling. Bosses sitting on cases."

Gerard didn't miss the sarcasm when Kimble said, "Yeah, that must be tough." 

The stereo moved on to "I Got Stripes," and he shot a look over at the bartender to see if the guy was being a smartass. Didn't look that way, with the man's face nearly flattened against his newspaper.

"When we got the call about you at Cook County and that doctor told us you'd saved a kid's life, we had a profiler telling us that you were a narcissist with a God complex. Turns out you were just good at what you did. Right guy in the right place."

Kimble chuckled at the pointed remark, relaxed a bit, though not entirely -- never entirely. "I heard you were at the prosthetics clinic not long after me. Figured it out when you saw Benny - the social worker with the terrible taste in shirts."

"Yep."

"Didn't matter then that you could see what I was looking for, did it?"

Without wavering, Gerard replied. "Nope." The inning ended, as did Cash's felon song. He thought about how pissed he'd been when Kimble was standing at the end of that drainpipe, aiming his own weapon at him. Then he remembered the shithole basement apartment where Kimble'd begun tracking down his wife's killer, the look on the young ER doctor's face when she'd said Kimble saved a boy's life, the sharp clatter of the phone when Kimble allowed the trace to lead the marshals to Sykes' apartment. 

The determination. Determination was something Gerard understood. And though it hadn't changed his ultimate goal of tracking Kimble down... "Well, guess it depends on what you mean by `matter.'"

It was clear, judging from Kimble's hesitation, the way he looked at Gerard, narrow-eyed and thoughtful, that he wasn't too sure what he meant by "matter" either. In the end, they'd both heard Gerard say, `I know you're innocent.' Couldn't deny that.

"What was it that changed things for you?"

Gerard finished his beer, took in the lounging, reading bartender, and decided he didn't want a second much anyway. "Don't know that it was one single thing. Meeting Skyes was a big part of it."

"He was former CPD. Didn't that give him a pass?"

Gerard chuckled. "I'm going to tell you something, Richard: from the very beginning, my dealings with the CPD didn't instill me with a whole lot of confidence." He waited a moment, turned events over. "But Sykes was a special case. Bad cops have a way about them that... well, anyway, you put a bad cop in the mix, and there's a need to reassess the situation."

"Did you get that feeling from Chuck?"

"Dr. Nichols? No. I just thought he was another rich asshole. Another one of your friends protecting you."

Kimble smiled sardonically. "I suppose that's one and the same to you."

"You mean rich assholes and your friends? Well..."

The bartender wandered over slowly. "Hey, Dr. Kimble, you want another?"

"No, thanks, Mac." Kimble looked over, and Gerard waved a "no." Kimble slid a $20 across to the man.

Finally, Gerard said, "You had a lot of good people looking out for you."

Kimble seemed more angry than relieved at the thought. "Yeah, wish I'd had less bad people doing the same."

There was a pause that left Gerard wondering if Kimble considered him one of the bad people. He supposed that, like the concept of Kimble's hunt for the one-armed man mattering, it was a kind of gray area that Kimble was still working his way through.

The baseball game returned, the stereo switched over to one of Patsy Cline's mournful tunes, and the bartender stopped by to return Kimble's change.

After he'd finished shifting bills around in his wallet, Kimble asked, "How is your partner?"

"Cosmo? He'll be back at work soon."

Kimble moved his elbows off the bar, and Gerard stayed put. It didn't seem like a situation that called for a good-bye or a promise that they would see each other later.

"Well..."

Without thinking, Gerard offered his hand. Kimble looked at him squarely and shook it.

After Kimble had left the bar, Gerard sat and ordered himself another beer. Considered for a moment the reporters who had wanted a joint interview and laughed. Listened as "That Old Wheel" picked up where Patsy had left off.

And after he finished his beer, Gerard boarded a train back to the city.

Work started early tomorrow. 

 


End file.
